General

Stormwater runoff is a major threat to the quality of waterways and estuaries in Australia's urban areas — our cities and large towns. Urban runoff can carry litter, sediment, bacteria, nutrients, oils and heavy metals into waterways. This can make urban waterways unhealthy as sources of drinking water, unsuitable for swimming, unable to support sensitive aquatic organisms and ugly to look at.

The traditional approach to urban stormwater management has been to build drainage systems that channel stormwater into local waterways, sometimes with little regard for the impact on those waterways. Whilst urban drainage design must continue to prevent flooding and to protect public health, new design approaches are being implemented to protect the water quality of urban waterways.

Over the last 20 years environment protection agencies, water resource managers, and urban planning authorities have developed new approaches to urban water quality, called Water Sensitive Urban Design. The main points of this design are that:

• stormwater management should be incorporated into new urban area design processes
• on-site stormwater management should address catchment-wide objectives (e.g. protecting the water quality of receiving waterways)
• stormwater management should incorporate features of the natural stormwater system as much as possible (e.g. existing wetlands and streams)
• stormwater management should use locally indigenous vegetation where possible.

Environment Australia
http://www.freshwater2003.gov.au/publications/poster/urban.html

The major contributor to the management of stormwater in NSW is the Environment Protection Authority through the Stormwater Trust Initiative.

See - NSW Stormwater Program
http://www.epa.nsw.gov.au/stormwater/usp/index.htm

And the EPA SOE;
http://www.epa.nsw.gov.au/soe/soe2000/cw/print_cw_5.9.htm

At a federal level stormwater management is promoted through Environment Australia and the Urban Stormwater Initiative.
See – Environment Australia
http://www.deh.gov.au/coasts/pollution/usi/

Also see
http://www.stormwater.org.au

Protocols

Please refer to the internal links on the right

Costs

50 sites with monthly sampling of 14 parameters (nutrients, physico/chemical, macroinvertebrates) = $80,000 pa (analytical and materials) plus 1.5 dedicated staff

Case studies

EPA Urban Stormwater Monitoring
http://www.epa.nsw.gov.au/soe/95/17_2s1.htm

Hornsby Shire Council
http://www.hornsby.nsw.gov.au/environment/index.cfm?NavigationID=1040

People contacts

CRC for Freshwater Ecology
Chief Executive, Professor Gary Jones,
Building 15, University of Canberra, ACT 2601
Phone (02) 6201 5168, Fax (02) 6201 5038
(or +61 2 6201 5168 and +61 2 6201 5038 if calling from overseas)
Email pa@lake.canberra.edu.au

Organisation contacts

NSW EPA Stormwater Management
stormwatertrust@epa.nsw.gov.au

Advanced Reference

CRC for Freshwater Ecology
Go to Research: Projects: Biological assessment and management in urban streams
http://enterprise.canberra.edu.au/WWW/www-crcfe.nsf/d87a31d8f4603d1d4a256641000e9021/7e16e5963b71476b4a25664a004a2493?OpenDocument